Every time I cook at my girlfriend's apartment, I envy her for having a fairly powerful gas stove (my own electric one takes forever to heat up, and can't both brown a pasta sauce and bring a pot of water to boil at the same time). On the other hand, I just lit her tea kettle on fire.

The End, the end of Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events is out, and I have finished it. (Location: The first two chapters curled up in bed, the next twelve curled laterally in a desk chair). The Amazon reviewers, including lots of disappointed children, hate it. Mysteries are left unresolved, important recurring characters and objects are simply dropped. It should have been called The Loose End.

That said, it now becomes possible to see both the narrative and philosophical arc of the entire series. The first two sets of three books each mark different versions of the "noble orphan" genre, books seven through nine are about struggling to be good even when the world believes that you are evil, and books ten through twelve about giving in to some of that struggle and doing some things that are an eensy bit questionable, morally speaking.

Books, especially childrens books, need not have any real social importance in order to be good art. But part of the appeal of the Snicket series has been the set of subversive lessons for life buried in the books. The philosophical outlook here ends up being somewhat existentialist, I think.

It was downhill from The Slippery Slope, which in retrospect makes perfect sense. Oh well.